For Sale: One Slightly Used Rocket

Just the other day I was saying to my wife, “You know, I’d sure like to get hold of a second hand steam-powered rocket, but you never see them for sale anywhere.” And then, out of the blue, I found one. As luck would have it, Mad Mike Hughes wants to sell his.

A while back, someone sent me a link to a story in ‘Scientific Method’ about ‘Mad’ Mike Hughes, a 60-year-old limo driver/stunt man from California. The story, written by Eric Berger, said Mad Mike was planning an attempt to break his own world record for jumping things, which was 1,374 feet. On 2 April 2016, Mad Mike planned to fly over Palo Duro Canyon in a ‘rocket limo,’ which he was building himself at his ‘rocket ranch’ in Apple Valley, California.

So I planned to write about this guy, but, as usual, I completely forgot about it until a few days ago when I came across the email again. By then it was 16 April, two weeks after the attempt was supposed to take place—which normally makes it a lot easier for me to predict the outcome. I can almost always tell you what’s going to happen in any given situation that has already occurred.

Well, not this time. Even after a careful, extensive, exhaustive, seven-minute internet search, in which I tried googling ‘Mad Mike Hughes’ and ‘idiot with rocket’ and ‘Palo Duro Canyon rocket jump’ and several other ideas, nothing came up. I honestly can’t find out what happened when Mad Mike tried to jump the canyon. Assuming he didn’t crawfish on the deal, like I would have.

This is pretty strange, since Mad Mike has a website and a Facebook page which do a pretty good job of letting people know what a stellar, fearless, outstanding human person Mad Mike is. You’d think if the jump went off as planned he would’ve posted something about it. And you’d think if he’d died in the attempt someone else would’ve posted something about it, somewhere on AlGore’s internets.

Mad Mike’s website has some videos of him setting his record of 1,374 feet, evidently somewhere in the desert near Winkelman, Arizona. It shows the steam-powered rocket taking off and flying in an arc over the desert, and then the parachute coming out. And then it shows some guys dragging Mad

Mike’s unconscious body out of the rocket onto the ground. And then it shows a couple of guys grabbing his arms and picking him up, still out of it, and then him leaning over the rocket, kind of waking up. This, apparently, is what it looks like when you set a world record in a steam-powered rocket near Winkelman, Arizona.

But that wasn’t the first world record jump Mad Mike made. No. In 2002 he set a Guinness World Record with a 103-foot jump. In a Lincoln Towne Car stretch limo. I guess if you drive those things around all day, being told where to go, you get to wondering just how far you could fly one through the air. Well, the limit is evidently 103 feet.

Mad Mike got his inspiration from Evel Knievel, who used to be pretty bad about trying to jump motorcycles over stuff all the time. He jumped cars, rattlesnakes, cougars, and no telling what all. Sometimes he made it; sometimes he crashed. Actually, he crashed a lot. He decided to jump the fountains at Caesars Palace in Lost Wages, Nevada in 1967, and ended up in a smoking ball in the Dunes parking lot. Linda Evans, who played Audra on Big Valley, was running a camera at the time, and filmed the famous wipeout.

Evel worked his way up to a steam-powered rocket during the 1970s, and tried to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in his SkyCycle X-2. I remember watching that attempt on television when I was a kid, and thinking, “This guy is crazy.” I was right.

Mad Mike is just as crazy, only he doesn’t have quite the funding Evel had. He told Eric, “Evel Knievel spent $600k on his rocket. I make $15 an hour. You do the math.”

So Mad Mike set out to build his own steam rocket, and Mad Mike is no rocket scientist. He told Eric, “I self taught myself.” Mad Mike is also no English teacher. Maybe that’s why he’s a limo driver.

Anyway, if you’re in the market for a gently used steam-powered rocket, the X-2 Sky Limo is evidently for sale. Mad Mike’s website says you can pick it up after the jump over the Palo Duro, ‘as is.’ The ‘three-foot collapsible nose cone’ may need a little Bondo, and there’s a dent in the fuselage that should buff out with some elbow grease. Show this baby a little TLC and you can be failing to jump canyons, rivers, and the odd abyss in no time.

I’d buy it, but I’ve got to go find out how far I can jump a ’97 Jeep Wrangler . . .

Kendal Hemphill is an outdoor humor columnist and public speaker who would like to point out that, although Evel Knievel was a role model for thousands of future crashing motorcycle riders, he was also a strong advocate of motorcycle helmets, and a strong opponent of drug use. Write to him (Kendal) at [email protected]